Why did SK Hynix's operating profit miss consensus, even with pretax profit landing above ₩100 trillion just as estimated three months ago?

Three months ago, Meritz Securities put out an estimate. SK Hynix's Q2 pretax profit would top 100 trillion won, a first for any KOSPI company. The catch: more than 40 trillion won of that wouldn't come from chip sales, but from an eight-year-old Kioxia stake.

On the 28th, the actual scorecard landed.

How close was the estimate

Revenue came in at 79.3187 trillion won, operating profit at 60.5426 trillion won. Up 257% and 557% year over year. That operating profit number nearly matches the 60.1 trillion won Meritz flagged three months ago. The core chip business moved roughly as expected.

So why the consensus miss

That doesn't quite add up on the surface. Why would the top AI-memory maker miss expectations at all. Reuters reporting points the other way. SK Hynix carries an unusually heavy mix of premium AI data-centre memory, chips like HBM. This quarter, though, it was ordinary DRAM and NAND pricing that jumped harder than expected. Rivals with more commodity-memory exposure captured more of that upside.

Same miss, different conclusions depending on which cycle you use as the baseline.

Net income still dwarfs operating profit

Net income came in at 93.9226 trillion won, well above the 60.5426 trillion won operating profit. That's a 118% net margin. The gap is the same Kioxia stake flagged in the earlier estimate. Money SK Hynix put in alongside Bain Capital back in 2018, buying into what was then Toshiba Memory, got cashed out as Kioxia's value climbed after its own listing. The direction matches Meritz's three-month-old estimate. What's different is that these are now the company's own confirmed numbers.

What do the 10 customer deals change

SK Hynix said it began mass-production shipments of HBM4 this quarter, with output set to expand in the second half. At the same time, it completed long-term supply agreements with roughly 10 major customers, deals that lock in volume and price years ahead. Korea Herald ties this to rising demand for AI agents that handle complex, autonomous tasks. As AI moves past chatbots into systems that act on their own, more customers want years of supply locked in.

AI demand drives SK hynix's preliminary Q2 operating profit to 60.5T won (Korea Herald, 2026-07-29)

출처: koreaherald.com

So what settles it

The question comes down to one thing. Which one previews next quarter: the 93 trillion won net profit, or the operating miss. If operating profit is the true scorecard for the core chip business, watch whether the consensus miss repeats next quarter. If this miss was a one-off tied to an unusually sharp jump in commodity memory prices, that gap should narrow. The Kioxia windfall is now mostly cashed out. From next quarter on, the operating profit line alone will show the chip cycle, without anything else mixed in.